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How The Futura Font Escaped The Nazis And Landed On The Moon

(via) There’s never any telling where a typeface will ultimately go after it leaves the designer’s desk. Such was the case with Paul Renner’s iconic Futura. These days, we associate the popular font with brands like Supreme and the films of Wes Anderson — cool kid stuff — but it’s been 90 years since Renner unleashed it on the world as “the typeface of today and tomorrow”. Its path has been anything but regular. This short film by Vox helps navigate the weirdness.

Futura was created by Paul Renner in 1920s Germany, just as the Bauhaus movement was picking up steam. …The newly powerful Nazis favored the ornate Fraktur type style to modern Futura, so they excluded both the type and its creator. Of course, Nazis are not just evil, but also often insane and inefficient — so Futura returned to Germany, as did Renner. But by that time, Futura had established itself as the international typeface of the future, and the font’s legacy was secured. That’s even more clear when you learn about the lunar plaque that went up on Apollo 11. Futura was the font selected for that great task — making Futura the font that escaped the Nazis and landed on the moon.